He had to be as cunning as an animal. He had to be an animal.

There was a time when the howling in his ears had been still, but Kerac couldn't recall how that felt. He'd been hearing the cry of the creature for too long now. What? An hour a day, two ... maybe a week, two weeks ... double that? A month? Many months? Couldn't tell.

The cries told him he had to escape. If he didn't escape, he'd die.

The howls told him what to do. He fell dead away in the cafeteria at Merimac, the state-operated prison for the criminally insane. He had no idea how long he'd been here, or what he had done to deserve being put away, but the cries told him clearly how to faint by restricting his own air supply.

It'd worked and he'd been taken to the infirmary. There the cries told him even before he'd fully recovered his senses that his disorder must be made more complicated if he was to be taken to a real hospital, outside the great walls that held him here.

Kerac dug for the piece of glass he'd held beneath his tongue, grateful he had neither swallowed nor choked on it. He waited for the prison doctor to look away before he reached down into his pants and slit his penis near in two with the glass. He made not a sound, just listened to what the noises inside his head instructed him to do. He lay back and let the blood fill his pants with a dark, purple splotch, a kind of "stigmata," the buzzing in his mind told him in an indecipherable tongue that somehow was translated into self-mutilation.

He wondered again what he'd done to deserve imprisonment alongside madmen. The pain in his privates was the price he must pay for escape. To keep from thinking about the pain, he concentrated on his laugh. He'd thought a great deal about laughter since coming here, and how important laughter really was. He let out with a laugh now which seemed to percolate in his diaphragm and erupt with the force of a volcano. It was a raw, naked laugh. The laughing slowed the cries, the howls and the mournful wails of an animal inside his brain.

When the doctor looked back at him, quaking from Kerac's laugh, he had a look of horror on his face. Kerac's eyes dimmed over with a thick, gummy substance, and suddenly he was seeing everything in a kind of 3-D, everything in clear perspective, angles and depths jutting out and in, nothing hidden in the dark shadow-covered corners. It was like seeing for the first time. It was wild and exciting. It was mind-blowing, like being on a heroin high, but without the color, because everything was in grays, blacks and shimmery whites.

His hearing had also become incredibly acute. He could actually hear the orderly's sneakers on the floor as he inched toward the door. He could almost hear the other man's heartbeat. He could hear someone in the TV room snoring. He could hear a fly breathe. It was a power he'd not ever expected to possess.

All this as well as his intensified sense of smell. In fact, he could smell the other men as never before, and in his brain he distinguished each man by his smell. The orderly sweat heavily and exuded a goatlike stench; he used no deodorant, while the doctor's perspiration was a cold, sweet scent; there was the faint scent of anise escaping his pores along with the disinfectant on his hands.

The look on the doctor's face, the look of shock and puzzlement, must be due to the cut and the blood, reasoned Kerac. But Kerac then caught sight of his own hands in the now colorless world around him, and he saw the extended claws and the hair and the nestling parasites in the fur covering his limbs. The realization that he was mad only now dawned on him, seeing himself this way.

He lifted off the table and the doctor and his orderly backed away in fright. Kerac saw his gray reflection in the doctor's glass cabinet. Like his mind, his body was all a tangle of knotted confusion. His eyes had dropped below the brow into a deep recess of dark circles created by folds of leathery skin from which prickly, whiskerlike hairs sprouted. His nose had enlarged, the nostrils flared. His jaw was snoutlike and the pain that racked his body made him shout, but the shout came out as an inhuman howl, the cry of a beast that had been raging in his head for as long as he could remember, which seemed to be the last few hours.

The orderly tore open the door in an attempt to race from the room, but Kerac's reaction was quick and instinctive, pouncing on the man in catlike fashion, ripping away at his face to stop the screaming.

"Kerac! Kerac!" shouted the doctor, pleading.

But Kerac's claws came down in rapid-fire fashion, turning the young orderly's features to mincemeat before he slid dead to the floor.

Screaming, the doctor tried to escape, but Kerac's hairy arm caught him about the neck, a deadly claw sinking deep into the man's throat, severing the jugular. Kerac tore a limb from the man as he was bleeding to death. He did so with playful ease, amazed at the strength he possessed. He wanted to try his strength again, but something cunning deep within his mind opted for escape. But not before he ripped apart his prey. He left nothing recognizable as human in a matter of minutes. Kerac lapped at the blood, crawling about the carrion on all fours. But hearing the shouts and footsteps of others, he tore away another limb, and taking his two prizes, he leapt through the window to the sound of sirens and the flash of lights.

One of the guards sighted Kerac, drew a bead on him and hesitated, realizing that the escaping form was some sort of animal. A second guard arrived just in time to see what looked to him like a large dog--maybe a bear--leap over the ten-foot fence, dropping something in its wake. The two men went to inspect what the creature had dropped at the foot of the stone fence. The flashlight told them it was a large man's bloody leg.

"Get the dogs!" shouted one of the guards to the other.

In an hour guards and dogs were scouring the woods surrounding Merimac, but they found nothing when the dogs refused to cooperate.